The Odyssey (2026): Nolan's Grand Summation is a sprawling message for all lost ages..

"The structure's nothing, without people's respect for its meaning."

-Penelope

Taking Homer's epic poem and shaping it into an exploration of survivor's guilt and the self-consuming nature of male-centric dominator culture really took me by surprise. Considering his previous life as a literature student, there was a lingering wonder as to how our era’s blockbuster auteur would tackle and interpret the urtext of so much of our culture as well as cinema this side of a more literal telling. Thankfully, The Odyssey is a Christopher Nolan film through and through, right down to the costumes and Trojan horse which looks like so many of his previous film’s close-up totems blown up to the scale of a small naval vessel in a scene that evokes the fish-in-a-barrel scene in DUNKIRK (2017).

Everyone, and I mean everyone is bringing their A-game, even as the larger film is a technical and thematic culmination of every work the blockbuster auteur has made thus far. This includes the great and not so great baggage that comes with his filmography.

This was never going to be about history, so much as the curses that follow us long after our recognition of the moment we turned our greed for power against ourselves. Abandoning the social contract ends worlds as Odysseus finds himself in the wake of the Trojan war.

War itself being civilization’s grand failure time and again signals as a recipe for a life forever haunted.

The entire cast of The Odyssey is truly hungry. That is abundantly clear throughout the film. As for me the largest, and most compelling surprises emerge from those eager to see their family home and safe. Giving Odysseus’ son, Telemachus some much needed agency and heart is a disarming masterstroke as Tom Holland attacks the role with both hands as the young prince seeks to find out what has happened to his father.

And as Damon has truly grown into the kind of weathered leading man that such a mythic character requires, inhabits Odysseus as a once true believer, now a spiraling husk of a man and leader who might have known his fate prior to his departure to Troy, suspecting full well that his path alongside so many of those he leads might have been questionable for a while before we meet him. It’s not an easy role to assume, but he really makes for a more complex, thoughtful portrait than was discernible from the written word. But if Samantha Morton doesn't get a slew of nominations for her role in a scene that must be seen repeatedly to be believed, there is no justice.

And yeah, Hathaway understanding how limiting Penelope has always been on the page, is a genuine thrill to witness even as her screen time is limited. And Eliot Page’s even shorter role as easily the most sincere messenger of the film is a gut wrenching reminder of the price of conquest. A culture of self-wounding vanity.

Which is where I must chime in on the manufactured ragebait culture that had been hounding this production ever since casting announcements were made. A larger reason why The Odyssey is so lost on the far right, is that Nolan's film is so largely US-coded, and his interpretation is so aggressively about the necessity of not only hospitality, and the fallout of forsaking higher aspirations, only to become decaying husks as the world you helped destroy moves on from you. It’s a work that wears its political leanings and philosophical underpinnings entirely on its sleeve, and must be ingested knowing why so many actors sport US accents throughout. Choices like these are deliberate, particularly with such productions, and with such directors.

Ambitious as hell, overlong, and perhaps a might hobbled by a reconfigured thematic aim which in a sense deflates the monster island stops, rendering the affair perhaps more melancholic than thrilling. But it met on its own boldly established terms, what we have here is Nolan’s ultimate message. One that has been brewing ever since Leonard Shelby went about on yet another quest for vengeance when it was more than clear that there was nothing in objective reality that could undo what created him. After all, a majority of Nolan’s character studies center on men desperate to climb out of their guilt, only to consume themselves and others in the process. The damage has been done, as the internal as well as external have become entirely new landscapes as his heroes scramble inevitably toward recognizing what could never be again.

And Damon’s Odysseus with his love for his home, now questioning the very nature of his entire world as his journey takes far longer than one could imagine, all while his wife and son long for his return while that very world seems poised to endlessly consume itself.

It’s all a meal that on occasion runs a little ragged like our central figure.

And yet when it cooks, it is a genuine feast.